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Google honors International Women's Day with doodle and video

Google is celebrating International Women's Day with a unique doodle and a video. The official day is March 8, but the team released the doodle about midday on March 7, because why limit the celebration of women to just one day?

As the creative team, made up of six men and five women, tried to decide on an appropriate way to mark the day, the designers went through several ideas.

"International Women's Day is a really hard topic," Google doodle team leader Ryan Germick told The Telegraph. "How do you surmise what women represent in a graphic?"

They finally landed on a combination of doodle and video because they didn't feel any single doodle could capture the full extent of women's contributions to the world. The team spent three months creating the doodle and the 1:20 minute video.

The doodle features 27 chromosomes, while the video features more than 100 women from around the world, including world leaders, activists and community groups. It is set to the music created by the Belgian Congolese group Zap Mama.

"It's a quick glimpse of what some women across the world are doing," said Germick. "We're just going for people doing great things. A 20-part DVD wouldn't have scratched the surface. We decided with the doodle format we could probably do a fun video."

In the past, the static doodles have featured women of different ethnicities and ages. In 2012, the "G" in Google was a female chromosome, and an "O" was turned into a flower. On the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day, in 2011, the doodle featured a female doctor.